Mediating the Message in the 21st Century

A Media Sociology Perspective

Pamela J. Shoemaker, Stephen D. Reese

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135858285
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Social Sciences

Hailed as one of the "most significant books of the twentieth century" by Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, Mediating the Message has long been an essential text for media effects scholars and students of media sociology. This new edition of the classic media sociology textbook now offers students a comprehensive, theoretical approach to media content in the twenty-first century, with an added focus on entertainment media and the Internet.

Chapter 1
Media Content and Theory

In this book we examine the forces that shape media content, the messages that constitute the symbolic environment. This is an ambitious task, given the multitude of factors that exert influence on the media. Not only that, but questions of media operation, bias, and control have moved to the center of the public arena, with an increasing number of media-literate citizens developing and promoting their own views. Media questions are often highly normative and highly politicized. Thus, the scholarly research questions we consider are very much in the public sphere, closely related to press criticism that circulates among activists, policy elites, and media professionals themselves. Reconciling these conflicting and often partisan-based charges can be difficult. What is more, a cynical public appears increasingly skeptical of the possibility of settling questions with evidence, substituting instead a combination of ironic detachment and impressionistic theories of personal media experience. But systematic media research on even the most controversial subjects is possible. That is why we must bring conceptual and theoretical organization to this area of research, to build understandings and research into a more comprehensive pattern. The same research tools used so extensively to examine media effects can be turned on those media and their links with culture, other organizations, and institutions. In developing Mediating the Message in the 21st Century, we hope to strengthen the case that these questions can be generated and examined with rigor given a clear and accepted conceptual framework. We expect the field of communication to devote the same sustained research to the creation, control, and shape of the mediated environment as it has to the effects on audiences of that environment.

Our approach to studying media messages comes from a social science perspective: We try to be clear about our definitions, assumptions, and perspectives, developing a model to locate our questions and suggesting how that model can be used to organize research and to suggest other hypotheses and fruitful areas for additional study. We call the model we have developed the Hierarchy of Influences, or more formally the Hierarchical Influences Model, and use it to organize the major chapters and studies discussed in this book. This model takes into account the multiple forces that simultaneously impinge on media and suggests how influence at one level may interact with that at another. The personal bias of an individual journalist, for example, may be relevant to reporting, but journalists of a particular leaning often self-select into organizations because of their preexisting policies, history, and organizational culture. The media organizations and their employees, in turn, must function within the ideological boundaries set by the larger society.

We do not assume that the Hierarchical Model captures all of the complex interrelationships involved in the media. Models, by definition, are meant to simplify, highlight, suggest, and organize. But in doing so, they can exert a powerful guiding effect in determining how questions are posed and defining the relationships singled out for investigation. In retrospect, the model used in our work has had a greater impact on the field than we imagined when we brought out the 1991 edition of Mediating the Message. Certainly a survey of the current field shows that research has grown, classes have been organized, and professional academic organizations have been launched. In addition, this area of study has been legitimated, and we suggest some reasons why this has been so. In part this can be attributed to the model providing a compelling way to think about the subject matter and more firmly integrating it into the existing communication field. As we prepare this work for the third edition, we take the opportunity to reflect further on how our ideas have changed, why we chose to emphasize certain ideas before, and why we have made different choices today. So, in setting out the book’s plan we may at several points draw comparisons with our previous editions and set them in historical context. We hope that this may be of interest in revealing our own thinking as we re-confront and make sense of this growing field.

We use the term media sociology to refer to the scholarship in this book, because it comes closest to describing what we are interested in. The term, however, does come with ambiguities and disadvantages. Certainly, many of the newsroom and other media ethnographies are typically referred to as media sociology, particularly given their use of traditional sociological fieldwork methods. But within the “influences on content” perspective we also include the more psychological studies of individual media workers and how their personal traits affect their decisions. Outside of the US fieldwork tradition, media sociology has been used in international contexts—particularly Europe and Latin America—to refer to the entire context of media production and performance, the entire social structural context. We use media sociology to refer to this larger body of interests concerning how patterns of symbols are linked to social structure—how the mediated symbolic environment gets constructed—by individuals within a social, occupational, institutional, and cultural context. Before laying out a broader model, we review below some of the key issues that must be understood.

Media Content

Analyzing the shaping of this symbolic environment means a central role for the concept of media content. As we develop a theory of media content, the shape of the symbolic environment is obviously a crucial component to be established. By media content, we mean the complete range of visual and verbal information carried in what were once called the mass media and increasingly by smaller more interactive and targeted channels. The features of this content have been measured in a number of ways, and we attempt to include a variety of perspectives—quantitative and qualitative. In some ways, content is a sterile-sounding term, but we will elaborate it with discussion of its specific shapes and patterns. As it takes on certain culturally significant features, it becomes more importantly the symbolic environment. Understanding content, even as a general term, is a crucial bridge between key areas of research: what shapes it and what impact it has (Reese & Lee, 2012).

Media Mirror?

When discussing content, particularly news content, there is a tendency to ask how “objectively” it reflects reality. For the sake of completeness, in our previous editions we included a reference in this discussion to the mirror hypothesis—the expectation that media reflect social reality with little distortion. This lack of distortion is sometimes vigorously defended in self-serving attempts by professionals to argue the accuracy of their work by holding it up as a “mirror to society.” In a subtle version of this idea, media are rendered neutral or objective by reflecting the self-regulating and balancing compromises between those who sell information to the media and those who buy it. This notion—the repudiation of which has launched countless media critiques—now seems rather quaint and self-evidently untrue (although that has not been sufficient to squelch it altogether). Certainly, the problematic issue of content—a disconnect between reality and its mediated counterpart—is a basic scholarly premise, not to mention an article of faith of the many media watchdog groups that monitor press performance. They find fault with those media for not adequately representing the reality they have in mind.

The notion of bias used by many press watchdog groups itself suggests that media deviate in some measurable way from a desirable standard that can be independently known. Of course, it is problematic to think of a reality out there with which we can compare mediated content. The postmodernists have been ridiculed by lay critics for rejecting the more traditional concept of a single, unified external reality, which suggests that there can be no independent standard for distinguishing among rival interpretations. But we all apprehend reality within the framework provided by our senses; even the concept of “empirical” reality refers to those things that can be measured using our senses. The simple fact is that we ultimately cannot lift ourselves out of our human context and apprehend reality apart from it. We address this more in Chapter 3.

We need not get too hung up on such philosophical problems. On a practical level we will often find it useful to compare media reality with social reality, people’s view of the world that is socially derived, what society knows about itself. Our assessment of social reality relies on numerous sources of information, including opinion polls, census surveys, historical records and other documents, all of which have their socially constructed qualities. But to the extent that media reality differs in systematic ways from these other forms of social self-knowledge, we can draw important conclusions about the structures underpinning these differences. Even if we were to accept the possibility of objectively portraying a “world out there,” the numerous studies over the years of media distortion have compared media content with other social indicators of reality. We assume that the media portray people, events, and ideas in ways that differ systematically from their occurrence in both various social realities.

Viewed another way, media content is fundamentally a social construction, and as such can never find its analog in some external benchmark, a “mirror” of reality. Distortion in this sense becomes irrelevant; social reality is meaningful in and of itself. Media-constructed reality has taken its place alongside other social constructions, such as mental illness, criminality, sexuality, gender, race, and other identities that are no longer considered self-evidently “natural.” If content is a construction, then to understand its special quality it is essential to understand the “constructing.” This realization in turn assigns greater importance to the research in media sociology, which is about exactly that. Therefore, it is a basic premise of this approach, rather than some tentative theoretical perspective, that the media exert their own unique shaping power on the symbolic environment, a shaping that is open to explanation using various theoretical perspectives—which we combine into the Hierarchy of Influences Model.

Building Theory

We attempt to place the subject of this book within the larger context of the field by locating it in relation to content. Accepting the problematic nature of content calls for a larger organizing theoretical framework. Therefore, when we first conceptualized this area, we took the idea of media content as a jumping off place, and we took pains to critique the “content research” that we were able to identify. It may seem self evident that content is the basis for media effects and needs to be closely examined, but many of the field’s most important lines of research have often not done so. Studies in the communication field that describe the features of media content proliferated, but they were largely unconnected and lacked any consistent theoretical framework. We noted in earlier versions of Mediating the Message how early, largely descriptive content research made little attempt to connect across studies, which often limited themselves to measuring the “number of” and “image of” (fill in the blank). We previously identified Warren Breed (1955) and David Manning White (1950) as among the first scholars showing the influences on content in a more research-based mode, with their examinations of social control in the newsroom and the news gatekeeper, but others did not follow their lead in communication until more recently (Reese & Ballinger, 2001), something we’ll explore more fully in the next chapter.

Our first effort to organize media sociology was strongly oriented toward theory building, and we began with a discussion of hypothesis testing. If the traditional communication field emphasized the transmission of effects from media to audiences, we argued for a just as important need to explain how those media and their messages were acted upon by a variety of influences. Thus, we promoted the idea of regarding media content within a variable analytic framework: that is, treating content as a dependent variable with which a number of independent variables were related and could be said to shape it. But if the traditional field was marked by surveys and controlled experiments, isolating an effect of interest, the media sociology domain has been much more diverse and messy, ranging across many levels of analysis and research traditions. Looking back we recognize that not all useful perspectives bearing on media sociology can be reduced to such straightforward linear relationships. Many of them are qualitative, interpretive, and naturally resistant to being described in more quantitative variable analytic terminology. Nevertheless, it seems more evident to us now that placing this messy area into a more clearly defined container—the stricter language of variables and influence—imposes a drive toward clarification, definitions, assumptions, empirical indicators, and relationships that are the hallmark of useful investigation.

This is what we have tried to do, even if calling that container “theory” may sound grandiose. Looking back, our goal was simply to begin to think seriously about assumptions, relationships, and ways of measuring. This makes it possible to draw connections, find similarities, and in short to build theory. Audience and effects theories have a longer tradition and are more finely drawn and focused, such as the social-psychological approaches to attitude change and, more recently, information processing. Perhaps, we should have been more cautious in making such a daunting claim to theory in assembling previously disparate strands of research. Nevertheless, we did just that and are glad others have found it useful. Hooking up the audience and effects side of the field with the shaping and control of content—within a consistent style of explanation—makes it easier to conceptualize the extension of the field into this less studied domain (as illustrated in Figure 1.1). For example, the intuitively appealing idea of media agenda-setting popularized by McCombs and Shaw (1972) suggests the powerful ability of the media to tell people what they should attend to. Given the extensive body of research into the idea of how the media set the agenda for the public, it is an easy rhetorical step to ask an equally important question: What sets the media’s agenda? Just by locating such a question within the framework of communication research gives it a certain legitimacy (Reese, 1991).

Integrating Effects on Content with Effects of Content

The broad field of mass or mediated communication research can be laid out as a combination of these two kinds of effects, with the content agenda itself as the bridge and a crucial element in our formulation (Figure 1.1). In our previous editions, we stressed the importance of incorporating measures of content into research, and much of the research in this book addresses the forces operating to shape specific

FIGURE 1.1 Communication research foci: Influences on content compared with influences of content

media messages. Others have taken media content into account, but have linked it either primarily to audience evaluations (such as, how certain content features affect television ratings, print circulation, or website traffic) or directly to effects on those audiences (for example, agenda-setting research requires some measure of the media content agenda, and experimental studies of media effects evaluate some aspect of the message). In other studies, media content is not assessed directly. These research areas include examinations of the active audience (the uses and gratifications tradition of media use), traditional effects studies measuring media behavior of audiences (exposure and attention), without explicitly measuring the nature of the content they consume.

In the next chapter we discuss why the field chose its particular emphases, but suffice it to say here that the more we know about how content is shaped and what form it takes, the more guidance we have in developing theories of effects—historically the main question of interest. Because many of the field’s theories come to us second-hand, particularly from social psychology and political science, we argue that the development of mass communication theory, by being largely derivative from other disciplines, was stuck on a plateau and would not grow until it began to deal with media content as a crucial feature, itself open to explanation. Much of the early theorizing in the field seized on media opportunistically as just another setting in which to examine individual response and behavior. Elaborate models of voting behavior, for example, may include one box, among many others, labeled “media.” Media use measures, included in countless surveys, show that news consumption is positively related to other desirable outcomes—such as informedness, political interest, and likelihood to vote. It seems like a simple idea to state that exposure to a medium is not the same as exposure to specific content, but many studies work around the task of specifically measuring it. The content of that media consumption remained implied rather than examined directly, and we have cited Gerbner’s many studies of television violence as an example of this idea (Gerbner, Gross, Jackson-Beeck, Jeffries-Fox, & Signorielli, 1978). His research typically asked respondents how many hours of television they watched, and from this it was inferred the number of acts of violence they would have likely seen. (Of course, in his case, numerous of his previous content studies of the “television world” confirmed key patterns of representation.) The “communication mediation model” of communication effects developed by the Wisconsin group falls in this category, targeting in the political realm, for example, the effects of exposure to campaign advertising and news consumption on political behavior, a relationship mediated by personal reflection and political discussion (Cho et al., 2009).

Audience research has tested how people feel about various media, including more recently mobile phones, the Internet, and video games—and current studies of news behavior are repeating this tendency. A recent study of young news consumers, for example, asked about their behavior and attitudes toward newspapers, local television, cable television, and “the Internet” (Brown, 2005). Of course, the Internet incorporates inf...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Original Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• CHAPTER 1 Media Content and Theory
• CHAPTER 2 Beyond Processes and Effects
• CHAPTER 3 Mediating Reality
• CHAPTER 4 Social Systems
• CHAPTER 5 Social Institutions
• CHAPTER 6 Organizations
• CHAPTER 7 Routines
• CHAPTER 8 Individuals
• CHAPTER 9 Studying the Hierarchical Model
• References
• About the Authors
• Index